William Barclay Squire (16 October 1855 – 13 January 1927) was a British musicologist, librarian and librettist.
Biography
William Barclay Squire was a devoted music enthusiast. He spent 35 years of his life (1885-1920) working for the
British Museum
The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...
, where he took charge of the collections of the music department and added many antiquarian publications to it. He was also music critic for ''
The Saturday Review'' between 1888 and 1894.
Squire prepared the publishing of the ''Catalogue of Printed Music before 1801'' (edited in 1912) and negotiated the deposit of the Royal Music Collection, for which he prepared the catalogue. He contributed numerous articles to the
Encyclopædia Britannica of 1911, to the
Dictionary of National Biography and to the
Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Occasionally, Squire acted as a librettist. His main work was the
libretto for ''The Veiled Prophet'', a Romantic Opera in 3 acts composed by
Charles Villiers Stanford
Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (30 September 1852 – 29 March 1924) was an Anglo-Irish composer, music teacher, and conductor of the late Romantic era. Born to a well-off and highly musical family in Dublin, Stanford was educated at the ...
, adapted from the homonymous ballad in
Thomas Moore's oriental romance ''
Lalla Rookh
''Lalla Rookh'' is an Oriental romance by Irish poet Thomas Moore, published in 1817. The title is taken from the name of the heroine of the frame tale, the (fictional) daughter of the 17th-century Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. The work consi ...
'', published 1890.
See also
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Vienna Café
References
Further reading
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External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Squire, William Barclay
1885 births
1927 deaths
English opera librettists
Contributors to the Encyclopædia Britannica
English male dramatists and playwrights
20th-century English dramatists and playwrights
Contributors to the Dictionary of National Biography
20th-century English male writers
20th-century British musicologists
Music librarians
19th-century musicologists